


Lost Time

by sariagray



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M, Smoking, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-19
Updated: 2012-07-19
Packaged: 2017-11-10 07:36:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/463803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sariagray/pseuds/sariagray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, the flat feels like a jazz lounge of decades past; Sherlock, sprawled on the sofa with a cigarette between his lips, the lighting gently dim, the smoke collecting horizontally like wispy blue stratus clouds. It’s startling to walk into the room and feel so transported, and even more startling when Sherlock pulls out his mobile or opens his laptop. It makes John temporally dizzy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost Time

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by the lovely analineblue.

_Lost time is never found again._  
Benjamin Franklin

Sometimes, the flat feels like a jazz lounge of decades past; Sherlock, sprawled on the sofa with a cigarette between his lips, the lighting gently dim, the smoke collecting horizontally like wispy blue stratus clouds. It’s startling to walk into the room and feel so transported, and even more startling when Sherlock pulls out his mobile or opens his laptop. It makes John temporally dizzy.

And that’s just it. Sherlock is, bizarrely, a walking anachronism. It’s starting to rub off on John, which is troublesome, as there are already days when he feels like an old man lost in the ceaseless march of technology, of progress.

Tonight is one of those nights. Cigarettes, ceiling-staring masquerading as musing, soft muffled music coming from the speaker that’s been buried under dossiers, books, medical journals, and cold case files. 

Mycroft had warned John once, and then repeated the caution (like a terrorist alert, with levels and corresponding colors), about Sherlock’s danger nights. John is fairly sure that he didn’t mean that Sherlock was at risk of slipping into the wrong time, but it’s something that leaves John curious and unnerved.

Still, the cocaine is another thing that looms, unremarked upon, between them – along with all of the other classes of drug. Trust (or its lack), maybe, connects all of John’s apprehensions and yet John puts his life in Sherlock’s hands on a regular basis, and Sherlock does the same in return.

On these nights, the ones where 221B slips quietly back to the late 1930s, John will join Sherlock with a cup of tea and an unspoken promise to not touch the television with its bright, flashy, loud reminders that the 21st century waits untouched outside their solid four walls. Sherlock, with his phone and laptop, will assimilate that technology as though he were a very advanced man (a witch, an alien – strange and dangerous with his knowledge) in the mid-1900s. It will be (as it always is) the most sensible thing, to let time and Sherlock flow over him.

It is, John thinks, a pre-danger night – Sherlock is just as at risk of falling back into the late ‘90s as he is the ‘30s and ‘40s, and that once-lived time was rife with needles-in-veins, or so John has been told by people like Lestrade and Mycroft. 

“Case?” John asks as he settles down in his armchair. He’s got a book to his left that he saves for such occasions, and he is, admittedly, excited to get back to it. It’s been over a week since his last reading.

“Hm.”

The ceiling, it seems, holds Sherlock particularly enthralled tonight. The grey ash of his cigarette lengthens a few centimeters before it is moved from between his lips to an ashtray that rests on the floor. Bull’s-eye, without even looking. John hates to admit that he’s even the tiniest bit impressed. Sherlock’s knuckles caress the carpet as he adjusts his hand.

There’s a slow lethargy to his movements, so no case. Still, the boredom doesn’t crease Sherlock’s face, not yet, so John relaxes his shoulders and feels more acutely the weight of his head. He wants to ask, ‘What year is it, then?’ but he won’t, because this is John’s own private classification of time and Sherlock would either glare in confusion or, worse, determine John’s meaning; the night would end on a rather embarrassing note either way.

The smoke doesn’t move. It’s midsummer, and hot, so all of the windows in the flat are open – but the air is thick with humidity and still, stagnant. Anything John says now might stick there in the cloying atmosphere, too. Words bathed in smoke, pinned in front of them like colorful butterflies’ wings so that Sherlock could stare at them and their presence could mock John for thinking they would dissipate, unnoticed by the world’s keenest observer.

Despite knowing this, the words gather heavily in his mouth as he watches Sherlock inhale, exhale, flick. It’s soothing to look at Sherlock out of the corner of his eye as he tries to read the next page in his book. The words there, in stark black-and-cream, are making less sense than the ones in his head and between his lips, and that’s terrifying.

Terrifying, because the words within him are intangible things, things that would be questioned, scrutinized, interrogated. Things that _he’s_ questioned himself, time and again. 

“Eating tonight?” he asks, because _those_ words can hang there in front of them as long as they bloody well please.

“Hm,” Sherlock says again.

It has a slightly different inflection than the previous hum, a soft lilt that indicates, quite clearly, that if something entertaining enough appears in front of him, Sherlock may in fact indulge in the act of consuming it. If this mood is any indication, probably something with sugar and crème and chocolate – empty calories, maybe, but at least it’s something.

“Right.” 

John flips to the next page, and reads the first word of every paragraph there, and then goes back to skim through all of the bits of dialogue. None of it makes sense, in the context of what happened two chapters ago, but it wouldn’t, would it?

Sherlock is on his third or fourth cigarette, open eyes facing the wall. If it wasn’t for the motions of his right arm as it lifts and drops methodically, or the occasional slow blink, John would begin to worry. This is quiet, though, and steady, and so he accepts it. 

“You’re thinking loudly,” Sherlock says after another fifteen or so minutes. 

He sits up and stubs out the last of what will most likely be the final cigarette of the evening (perhaps the week, or the month).

“I’m _reading_.”

“No.” John can hear the smirk in Sherlock’s voice. “No, you’re looking at words.”

John closes the book, because Sherlock’s right, but he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t even switch his gaze, opting instead to keep his stare focused on the illustrated cover. They could go out, exit 1930-whatever and return to a world of movement, of mobile phones and the internet and cars that run on vegetables, but that wouldn’t really change a thing.

Because they can’t go out, not really.

John closes his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath that fills his lungs to capacity – breathes until no more air can fit inside of him. He releases it slowly and opens his eyes. The flat is empty. No smoke hanging heavy in the air, no music drifting through a tinny speaker that has long since been packed away, no Sherlock reclining on the (empty, bare, lost) sofa. 

Only the humidity remains, and the words John never had the chance – the courage – to say.

**The End**


End file.
